The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (40 page)

“Why do you see it as degradation?” replies Aleksandar. “It’s a beginning. They cannot rule the country without the people. But you need the people.”

The activists’ reaction to the exercise is a common one. The trainers anticipated it. Popovic had told me once before that almost every
movement thinks that its situation is wholly unique. People attending the workshop are always quick to point out why the Serbian example wouldn’t translate to their own political environment, or why the regime they are up against is unusually brutal, clever, or insidious. The Ukrainians said they had to worry about Russian interference, since Moscow was backing the regime. In Egypt, activists pointed to the fact that Mubarak could count on American support. They are usually quick to mention how large the regime’s domestic security budget has become or how many police or informants walk the streets. Popovic is the first to admit that no two situations are identical. If they were precisely the same, then the Serbs would have no problem telling people what to do. But he insists, much as Gene Sharp argues in
From Dictatorship to Democracy
, that the fundamentals are the same. Understand those building blocks, and you can build your own plan of attack.

It takes time for it to sink in. The activists admitted at the beginning of the workshop that one of their biggest problems is that the majority in their country does not view them sympathetically. They know they have a message problem. The Serbs acknowledge that it can be difficult to craft a vision that encompasses enough key groups. In the case of Otpor, they sent members out to various parts of the country to interview people about what they wanted. They spent time identifying who some of the most respected people in the country were. In some rural areas, it was the doctors. In other places, it was the teachers. Either way, the thinking was that if these people could be won over, it would add even more numbers to their movement. Eventually, one of the Middle Eastern activists, one of the youngest in the room, says what is painfully obvious: “Well, we probably haven’t thought enough about how we could build supporters.”

“Finally,” whispers Dragana. It’s a start.

The Serbs now turn the discussion to what the activists are up against. They ask the group to identify the regime’s pillars of support—for example, the military, police, bureaucracy, educational system, organized religion—the main institutions from which it draws its strength. The next step is for the activists to make what they call a “power graph.” It’s an analytical tool developed by Slobodan Djinovic, one of CANVAS’s founders. “This makes us focus on who is with us and who is against us, and how we can influence them,” says Aleksandar.

Again in small groups, the activists chart each institution’s reaction—along a spectrum of varying degrees of positive, neutral, and negative—to significant political events, protests, actions, or moments in a chronology going back roughly ten years. Popovic told me that producing the power graph was always a key moment in the workshop. And so it was for this group of activists. What they found when they isolated the different pillars of the state was that their loyalty or attitude toward the regime had fluctuated over time. For example, parts of the educational establishment had been somewhat sympathetic to some of their actions, if only because students had participated. In other instances, the media had taken a slightly critical opinion of the government, if only slightly. By looking at the regime this way, the activists immediately understand two things: the regime is not a monolith, and its loyalties are malleable. “Loyalty is not carved in stone. It can be changed,” says Dragana. “Loyalties can be shifted.”

The Serbs stress that if you attack a part of the regime, the natural reaction is for the rest of the regime to rally around that portion that has been targeted. They perceive their own interests to be more aligned with the regime under attack than with your movement. “The goal will be to pull the pillars of the regime with persuasion, not to push them through attacks,” says Aleksandar.

Some pillars are obviously more susceptible to persuasion than others. The military and the police are usually the last to come around. But then again, movements do not require the support of security services; they just require their ambivalence. And, as the Serbs explained, even the most thuggish cops can be neutralized.

During their struggle, the Serbs encountered one particularly brutal police chief. He operated with the impunity of a king in the small city where he was stationed. “He enjoyed beating people up, torturing them,” says Dragana, pursing her lips in disgust. “He got off on it.” So they figured they could not sway him, at least not directly.

Instead, they took photographs of him beating up young members of the movement. They had those photographs made into posters and put his name and cell phone number on them. Then they plastered them everywhere his wife shopped. They put the posters up on her route to the kindergarten where his child went to school. The posters urged people to call and ask him why he was torturing our children. His wife was appalled. The family would quickly become pariahs. “We
didn’t attack him in uniform,” says Dragana. “We attacked him in his home through his wife. We weren’t going to let this bastard hide behind the system or the badge.”

The example resonated with the group. “There are these monstrous people, and they hide behind the seal of the regime,” one activist responded. “This gives the regime a face.” People nodded in agreement.

After each day’s session, the activists would meet in their own groups to digest that day’s lessons and analysis, debating the meanings for them. Clearly, the discussion was raising fundamental questions for some members of the group, very much the types of questions that the movement’s leadership wanted discussed. “It’s a shock for some of them,” one of the leaders says to me. “Like, whoa, you mean we weren’t doing everything right?” But the majority of the activists are engaged and eager to learn more.

One of the key sources of power for any regime is authority. The perception of authority alone—and the fear of defying it—are the causes of most people’s obedience. So if a movement wants to encourage people to withdraw their consent, to interrupt their obedience to the regime, then undermining the regime’s authority is a key objective. For Otpor, the answer was laughter. “Humor undermines the authority of the opponent. Humor is also the best cure against fear. Use it as much as you can,” says Aleksandar. “Try to surprise the enemy. Use as many combinations of actions as possible. That is our strong recommendation.”

Humor may, in fact, have been Otpor’s signature weapon. Members of Otpor came up with countless ways to reduce the authority of the regime through humor and ridicule. One example involved turkeys. Miloševic’s wife, Mirjana, often liked to wear a white flower in her hair. Members of Otpor saw it as an opportunity. They got their hands on several turkeys and put white carnations on their heads. Then they released them in downtown. The turkeys walked down the city streets. Anyone who saw a turkey with a white carnation would immediately know it was a reference to Miloševic’s wife. (As Dragana points out, laughing, “In Serbia, calling a woman a turkey is one of the worst things you can do.”) Police were dispatched to apprehend the turkeys. Members of Otpor were at the ready to snap photographs of
police officers desperately trying to corral the birds. When they eventually did, the turkeys were taken down to a local police station. Anticipating this, Otpor immediately
issued a call for the turkeys’ release, saying that they had been unlawfully arrested and they had reason to fear for the birds’ safety.

CANVAS’s trainers call this and similar stunts dilemma actions. When done correctly, they are low risk and put the focus on what your opponent will or will not do. “The purpose of these actions is to create a dilemma for the adversary,” Aleksandar explains to the group. “The actions create a dilemma for the police, who are forced to choose between two unfavorable choices. They can’t let a turkey mocking the president’s wife walk around. But they know they look like fools chasing a turkey.” Anyone who is asked to chase turkeys in a city’s downtown is going to lose respect for the regime. And the regime itself hardly looks intimidating when its police are left herding birds. “At that point, we didn’t have a way to listen to their communications,” says Aleksandar, still laughing, “but I would have loved to have heard them call this one in to headquarters.”

The Middle Eastern activists left the room to try to design some of their own dilemma actions. Meanwhile, I talked with Dragana about her time as a CANVAS trainer. Of the forty workshops she had helped lead, she said a group of Bolivians was one of the most impressive. They learned fast, maybe too fast. “On the fourth day, we came into the room, and they had put newspapers on all the chairs. The newspaper was reporting on the front page an action they had done that night, after the workshop! I came in and they said, ‘Look what we did!’ ” she recalled. “A lot of times [after the workshops], I find out later what they have done, and I say, ‘Oh my God, they were planning that all along.’ ”

Sometimes plans backfire, too. Dragana told me about one group of Iranians who failed to think through everything. There were shortages of gasoline in Iran at the time, and the group thought this was an issue they could exploit. “These guys planned to hold a silent protest at gas stations. The plan was to line up at gas stations holding empty containers,” she recalled. “What they failed to predict was how fast [bystanders] would join in. There were two hundred people at one gas station in an hour. The number kept growing, and riots started. They
burned sixty gas stations.” The problem is that the action quickly grew to include people who were not part of the movement, so there was no way for members to maintain nonviolent discipline. Later, Dragana heard from members of the Iranian diaspora who were happy with the whole episode. She was appalled. “No, no,” she said. “This is not what I taught them. Burning gas stations will not help their cause.”

Of course, there are some groups that CANVAS simply refuses to work alongside. In one instance, while in Johannesburg, CANVAS was contacted by a member of the British consulate. The official wanted to contract with CANVAS to work in the Kingdom of Swaziland, which has been ruled by the same corrupt family for decades. The problem was CANVAS wouldn’t have been working with a homegrown movement; it would have been nonviolent struggle by proxy. “He said money is no object,” recalls Dragana, laughing. “Well, that’s nice, but that is not how we operate. We are not mercenaries.”

As the seminar continued, the focus shifted to evaluating some of the movement’s own actions. The activists had achieved a number of successes. Through sheer persistence, they had won the ability to operate in certain areas and neighborhoods that would have been unthinkable eighteen months earlier. They had also earned the support of several well-known and respected academics, who had lent their names and reputations to the cause. They had a strong brand, and the movement’s numbers had grown. But after listening to the trainers, the activists realized another mistake they had made. They had operated with a siege mentality for so long they had forgotten to declare their victories. It is not just a matter of morale boosting. Declaring victory is an important opportunity to communicate with the public and build credibility. “When we were accommodated, we never publicized it as a victory,” one of the activists said. “We never marked it with a big
V
. That was a mistake.”

The Serbs referred to it as “doing postproduction.” “Everything you do should be capitalized,” says Aleksandar. “First of all, proclaim the victory. Second, be sure that potential members and supporters know about it. You need a victory every week, even small victories. If you are on the defensive, you lose.

“You always need to be a step ahead. You need to answer the what-if,” Aleksandar continued, reinforcing the need for advance
planning, something that had become a mantra over the course of the week. “Do your homework, choose a target, and build a winning record.”

At the end of the seminar, the Serbs stayed for an extra couple of days for some sun and sand. They wanted to spend time relaxing on the nicer beaches, a world away on the other side of the island.

The activists had to get home. They took the short cab ride to the airport and caught one of the last flights out. A few weeks later their country had waves of marches and demonstrations. They were the largest protests in a generation.

P
eople had been asked to assemble at 2:00 p.m. No one knew who had issued the call. A group, identifying itself only as the “organizers of China Jasmine Rallies,” had posted a message on Boxun, a Chinese-language news Web site based in the United States. It read, “
We call upon each Chinese person who has a dream for China to bravely come out to take an afternoon stroll at two o’clock on Sundays to look around. Each person who joins will make clear to the Chinese ruling party that if it does not fight corruption, if the government does not accept their supervision, the Chinese people will not have the patience to wait any longer.” The calls for a “Jasmine Revolution”—borrowing the name from the revolution in Tunisia a month earlier—quickly spread to other Web sites and on the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The group behind the message identified specific locations in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and more than a dozen other major cities around the country where people were to come out for a “stroll.”